Noa Gertin at Palore just pinged me with some real happy talk kind of news. According to their data, which they get from crawling local search sites, the search engine advertising spend for SMBs took a 50%+ hit in Sept/Oct 2008. Noa, if you’re reading this, how do you know this is SMB spend and not just overall ad spend? (e.g. if a few big brands which make up a nice chunk of overall spend cut their budgets, it could…
Tis the season to do nice things and Local.com has come up with a nice promotion to get advertisers to sign up. According to the press release: Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM)…today announced the launch of a new holiday program in which the company will be donating one toy to Toys for Tots for each business that signs up as a new advertiser with Local.com. Note to Local.com: watch out for those pre-K SEOs signing up and trying to game the…
It’s entitled “Let’s Talk“. I don’t know anything about it but the graphic makes it look ginormous. Tip o the hat to Tad Chef
I recently spoke with a small business that had turned off its SEO efforts in the summer. They were impressed with the traffic growth – daily search engine traffic had doubled in about 30 days – but lead volume from their website had stayed flat. I checked the terms that were driving traffic and they were good “qualified” search queries signaling purchase intent. While their conclusion was that the SEO was not effective, although that may have been the case…
Apparently Sequoia Capital had a meeting with its portfolio companies this week where they gave them some grim advice for how to weather the bad economy. One of the talking points that stood out for me from this report of the meeting: In a downturn, aggressive PR and Communications strategy is key. To continue on my self-serving post series, I interpret this as a strong recommendation to focus on high ROI marketing efforts like SEO. If their is huge uncertainty…
Downtreprenuer [doun-truh-pruh–nur] a person who organizes and manages a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk, because they have lost their jobs and baby needs a new pair of shoes. As different industries falter in the economic downturn (think real estate professions, the auto biz, etc.), people will start to look for alternative ways to make money. The Web offers one of the cheapest ways to start a business. Get a cheap/free website from someone like Merchant Circle or Homestead…
If you read Reputation Management Jujitsu you know that saying nice things about not-so-nice companies can be a powerful linkbuilding tactic. Of course it’s also true that saying nice things about nice companies can also work. For example, last week I posted Mixpo is Pretty Cool after seeing a demo at the Kelsey DMS show. Today I found that Mixpo’s VC, Yaletown Venture Partners, had just posted a link to my post, which should help improve the ranking of my…
Steve “McStud” Espinosa has another very useful local search post that shows why you should be subscribing to his blog’s feed. Here’s the gist of it: He tested how to get more calls from your Yahoo Local listing. This technique resulted in “1.8x more calls”: Insert Keyword into Business Name Upgrade to a Yahoo Local Enhanced Listing Write a well optimized description Get plenty of 5 Star Reviews Get all of the details here.
Just when you were thinking that the world needed one more online yellow pages with customer reviews, Best of the Web beat you to the punch and launched BOTW Local. So what makes this different from all of the other local search guys out there? On its face, not much. However, in SEO circles BOTW is considered a tier 1 Web directory, which means that when your SEO guy is starting a linkbuilding campaign, there’s a good chance he starts…
The WSJ writes today about the emergence on online video advertising for small businesses. According to the article some advertisers are seeing great performance. This bodes well for the growing legion of SMB video ad sellers. Here are a few that you might want to check out: AdReel Jivox JiffySpots Mixpo SpotMixer TurnHere One of the things that caught my eye in the article was how the “try it for free” incentive was key to attracting the business profiled in…